Deutsche Telekom launched its first all-you-can-eat mobile tariff in its home market Germany. Dubbed the MagentaMobil XL package it will set you back 79.95 euro a month but includes unlimited high-speed data for surfing and streaming within Germany, and 23 gigabytes of data for roaming across the European Union.

T-Mobile is looking for ways that it can make as much money in the EU as it does in the US. The US figures are nearly double its EU take. Telekom’s new Germany head Dirk Woessner told hacks that the company was hoping to build its market leadership by sales volume.

Deutsche Telekom has around seven million customers for its MagentaMobil product range, which will have five price points including a new low-end deal at 19.95 euros ($24.60) a month.

Telekom’s average monthly revenues per user (ARPU) for contract customers in Germany were 20 euro last year, down 4.8 percent. That compares with postpaid ARPU of 39 euro on branded products sold by T-Mobile US.

The company has no plans to change a separate mobile video streaming product, called StreamOn, despite an order by the German federal network regulator that it be offered on the same terms throughout the EU.

“We see StreamOn as an offering that is very popular - and that is clean and fair into the bargain. Nothing has changed there”, said Woessner.

To meet mobile backhaul demands, T-Mobile Netherlands has deployed the OSA 5420 Series in its core network and at metro aggregation points.

By harnessing the latest IEEE 1588v2 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) technology, the solution enables accurate phase synchronisation throughout the national infrastructure. This makes emerging technologies possible such as coordinated multipoint transmission for enhanced data availability.

Despite its small footprint, the OSA 5420 Series also delivers the highest level of holdover performance available on the market, giving T-Mobile Netherlands the ultimate protection from GNSS outages. For even higher levels of availability and resiliency, the OSA 5420 Series comprehensively supports all major GNSS constellations.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 will end up with pre-order customers before the end of this week. But if they get one from T-Mobile US, people might experience GigabitLTE speeds in the near future.

T-Mobile has shared the maximum you can expect from a GigabitLTE Samsung Galaxy S8 / 8+ phone powered by Snapdragon X16 GigabitLTE modem, that is packed inside of the Snapdragon 835 SoC.

Of course, the Galaxy S8 and 8+ phones use 4x4 MIMO, carrier aggregation and 256 QAM. These are all features that are the part of the Snapdragon X16 GigabitLTE modem. Last year’s Galaxy S7 was the first phone to demonstrate the combination of 4x4 MIMO, carrier aggregation and 256 QAM and the tradition continues. T-Mobile was the first to roll out the 4x4 MIMO last year.

It is expected that the first Galaxy S8 from T-Mobile will reach customers who pre-ordered on the 21 April - so at the end of the week.

The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ will be the very first devices that let T-Mobile customers use LTE-U to tap into underutilized unlicensed spectrum on the 5 GHz band.

Charismatic John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile said: “You know what happens when you combine the most advanced LTE network in the country with Samsung’s most powerful phone ever? An entire industry has to redefine the word ‘fast‘. Anyone upgrading to the Galaxy S8 can see up to double their current LTE speeds in nearly 300 cities nationwide! That’s a clear first place finish for the Un-carrier.”

GigabitLTE or Gigabit LTE, which is what T-Mobile calls the technology, is expected to roll out to a lot of cities across the USA this year, but the company didn’t reveal any dates now.

Internet speeds will definitely increase on the GigabitLTE capable phones but it will be hard to say that it will double in every case. It might double, depending on the user case, but there is no doubt that it should get your download and upload speeds significantly faster than on 300 Mbps capped Cat 6 networks.

It is not a big secret that Verizon is the biggest network in the US, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile, but T-Mobile is doing a great job in catching up and now the outfit has announced that it plans to spend $8 billion to improve its 4G network.

The outfit's innovative and daring CEO John Legere gets a lot of media attention and the company is continuously growing with its Unlimited plans and good offers. The carrier just announced that it is spending almost $8 billion to acquire more than 1,500 wireless licenses that span across the United States.

The licenses mostly cover the 600 MHz spectrum for rural coverage. The lower the band, the further it can travel and can penetrate walls. Lower frequencies are the foundation of the good coverage and in carrier aggregation, carriers combine the lower and higher frequency bands for better speed.

A while ago, Verizon and AT&T made a big investment in the 700MHz range that share similar properties. Spending $8 billion to get 600 MHz bands proves a big commitment to the future in both 4G and 5G for T-Mobile.

The 600 MHz frequencies in the US are being used by TV broadcasters and it might take up to 2020 for them to free up these frequencies. This is why this can be seen as a long-term commitment as 600 MHz bands..

Currently, there is no modem that supports 600 MHz, at least not officially. The reason being is that there are no 600 MHz networks in the US.

Finland and France are the only two counties using the 700 MHz, and this only happened in February 2017 in Finland and September 2016 in France. We are sure that more carriers will go after these lower frequencies if they get free, but Europe is even more complicated as every of the 50 countries has its own bids for frequencies.

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have been using 700 MHz since 2014, having a much bigger head-start compared to the old continent.

Qualcomm is working on 600 MHz support for its modems and based on our guess getting from 700 MHz to 600 MHz should not be that hard. The main question is if you will need to make an additional antenna for 600 MHz band or you can use the antenna that covers the 700 to 850 MHz bands.

Making the modern phone work on the 600 MHz band is a combination of a modem support as well as a proper antenna. Modern phones, including the Galaxy S7, S8 and the Sony Xperia XZ, support four antennas, this should not be that big of an issue in the years to come. We expect to see more and more phones having four antennas, starting with the high end and later getting to a mainstream and entry level market.

T-Mobile says that 8 billion bought it 45 percent of all spectrum sold. T-Mobile License LLC has acquired 1,525 licenses for $7,993,361,993. If you round it up, you end up at $7.993 Billion. AT&T Spectrum Holdings LLC acquired 23 licenses for $ 910,202,302.

ParkerB.com a company behind the Dish spend $6.2 Billion for 480 licenses, but it is not clear what the company wants to do with them.

CC Wireless Investment, LLC the company representing Comcast was the third biggest spender in the auction. It spent $1.7 billion for 73 licenses they announced plans for a wireless service recently. US Cellular acquired 188 licenses for $328 million while Verizon and Sprint chose not to bid.

Verizon probably has enough of 700 MHz spectrum but we are curious about the Sprint decision as the company needs to expand its network and 600 MHz spectrum is the step in the right direction.

The next big fight for the spectrum will be in the high frequencies you need for the 5G speeds but it looks like we are still a long way away from it.

T-Mobile US is talking a lot about network un-carrier innovations including 4G advanced features such as 4x4 MIMO, QAM 256 and QAM 64 but it looks like the company is working hard on 5G too. T-Mobile has already demonstrated mobile speeds of 1.8 Gbps and fixed speeds of 12 Gbps with latency of 2ns. Things look to be much faster and seamless in 2017 and the years to come, Happy New 2017 Year, that gets us a step closer to that.

Neville Rayay, Chief Technology Officer of T-Mobile Un-carrier in the US, has shared a video and the company’s vision of how things might look in 2020. This is when we expect to see quite a lot of 5G networks and with some luck we might see some real commercial deployment of a 3GPP 5G network by 2019 too.

The maximum speed of a few Gbps for mobile devices and 12 Gbps for fixed devices with latency of 2ns will enable a lot of new content. Think about 4K 360 video, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality that will need much more download and upload speeds than you can get today.

Video is showing massive possibilities in Augmented Reality applications and Fudzilla has already said that we expect to see that Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will eventually merge in the future.

T-Mobile showcased a user scenario where a biker might use an Augmented Reality real time navigation that could even include a rear view camera. Of course, it would make biking much safer and easier warning you if you have a car behind. The real-time language translation could enable much easier communication, phasing out speech barriers. There will be an interactive mobile learning user case where a lady can get AR assistance how to fix her motorcycle. Another user case shows a runner that can get all the necessary data in AR.

T-Mobile expects people to livestream videos and concerts on their mobile devices, providing them with better experiences than anything we have today. Think, for example, about 360 degree 4K or even 8K video matched with AR or VR.

T-Mobile didn’t mention car-to-car communication in 5G, or a few other user case scenarios, but new technologies will rely on the faster speeds with lower latency. This is what 5G is all about.

The Snapdragon X50 is the world’s first 5G modem that will help carriers and un-carriers with real life trials, but we expect to see a successor of Snapdragon X50 based on the full 3GPP 5G specification as soon as the standard gets locked. This is most likely to happen in mid-2018, at the earliest.

Back in September, T-Mobile in the US announced that it supports 4×4 MIMO as well as QAM 256 on the download and QAM 64 on the upload side. The first phone to get this support was the Samsung Galaxy S7 and it looks like in 2017, T mobile will get you to 1Gbps class speeds or speeds up to 979 Mbps.

If this number sounds familiar, you are right to match it with the Snapdragon X16 modem speed. This is, up to date, the fastest modem even released by anyone and was launched as a standalone feature in February 2016. Back in November, Qualcomm announced that the Snapdragon 835, a new 10nm SoC will feature the Snapdragon X16, Gigabit class modem inside.

T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray has talked a bit about the network innovations and 1Gbps speeds in the latter part of 2016. The company was the first operator in the US to launch 4x4 MIMO and 256 and 64 QAM in 2016 and just before the end of the year it showcased close to 1 Gbps (979 Mbps) on T-Mobile’s LTE network in the lab. To get to this speed, it used a combination of three carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM on and an un-released handset. There is a very short video of the test all the way down.

You can bet that this is a Snapdragon 835 device, simply as no one from the competition has a 1Gbit class modem right now. Snapdragon 835 will be the first and we expect to see dozen of high end phones launching with it around late February time at the Mobile World Congress 2017.

Very fast 4G Advanced with speeds up to and later an exciting 1Gbps, will serve as a great foundation for 5G. Australia’s Telstra is the world’s first network to launch a 1Gbps service and Fudzilla had a chance to see the demonstration back at Qualcomm’s 4G / 5G summit in Hong Kong.

It looks like T-Mobile and a few others around the world will increase their speeds from 300 / 400 Mbps all the way to 600 and 1Gbps speeds. Remember, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X50 5G modem is supposed to sample in the latter part of 2017 and we should see some devices in time for the Winter Olympic in Pyeongchang 2018, Korea, scheduled to start on February 9th 2018. We are just 13 months from that time, the time of a few Gbps download speeds.

Telstra in Australia was the first company to launch both 600 Mbps and 1Gbps networks but it looks like T-Mobile in the US plans to launch 1Gbps in 2017 too.

The T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray, has stated that the company will be "approaching Gigabyte speeds" by next year. He carefully used these words as Cat 16 downlink that you saw with Snapdragon X16 standalone modem and that is now part of Snapdragon 835 in a gigabit class modem.

The Cat 16 standard supports up to 980 Mbps but with custom compressions, Qualcomm is one of the companies which can get it closer to 1Gbps in some ideal cases.

T-Mobile is using two technologies in order to reach 1Gbps. One is called 4x4 MIMO, Multiple Input Multiple Output and Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are the two prominent phones which support this. The company released an OTA update in September enabling MIMO.

The second piece of the puzzle is called 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Management) that supports the download and 64 QAM that speeds up the upload. QAM is used for Wi-Fi signals and does a great job.

The CTO has confirmed that there will be multiple devices in 2017 to support MIMO and one of the unfortunate developments for MIMO is that the Galaxy Note 7 was canned. That device supported 4x4 MIMO too.

We expect that many other companies plan to support 1Gbps speeds in USA and the rest of the world. This seems to be the direction that will be the following step after many companies started using Carrier Aggregation that is enabling providers to 300 Mbps download and 100 Mbps upload. Speeds approaching 1Gbps will be normal after 2017.

LG recently said that its upcoming V20 smartphone is the world’s first “native Android 7 device,” but it appears the company may also have another first-to-market feature for the device in terms of LTE spectrum support.

According to filings from the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, the LG V20 will be the first consumer device to support LTE Band 66. This range of spectra include the AWS-1, AWS-3 and AWS-4 frequencies. The top three wireless carriers in the US currently support AWS-1 on band 4, while AWS-4 is currently owned by Dish Network for downlink operations. More broadly, however, AWS-3 is an upcoming supplemental frequency range that will be rolled out over the next two years.

AWS-3 licenses granted in 2015, deployment begins next year

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Dish Network and seven others were all granted rights by the FCC to AWS-3 spectrum back in April 2015, but none of the top wireless networks have deployed it just yet. Last month, T-Mobile’s Investor Relations department signaled that the network plans to begin deploying AWS-3 later this year, ahead of AT&T and Verizon.

For the most part, AT&T claims it should have a “near nationwide contiguous 10x10MHz block of high-quality AWS-3” covering 96 percent of the US population. The company will begin deploying the spectrum late next year, but not in significant volumes until 2018. It intends to use the spectrum as supplemental downlink and uplink bandwidth and expects most AWS-3 capable devices to launch in 2017 and 2018 as well.

And Verizon says its AWS spectrum now covers 95 percent of the US population. The company will also begin deploying AWS-3 in 2017, but may not have significant coverage volumes until 2018.

The fruity tax dodger Apple is seeing its share price soar on the back of industry spin about the iPhone 7’s success, but there are actually no signs that the shiny toy is doing as well as the Tame Apple Press would have you believe.

Apple released its usual statement this week saying that the iPhone 7 pre-orders have broken all records. Sprint said pre-orders were up nearly four times, compared to last year. Pre-orders also rose nearly four times at T-Mobile, compared with its next most popular iPhone. Verizon's iPhone 7 pre-order volume is within normal range. But AT&T volumes are up year-over-year.

However, no one has given sales numbers and we are being asked to accept these unlikely increases on blind faith. To be blunt, the iPhone 7 is selling in a dodgy market with a spec which is the same as the early cheaper model, with much better alternatives out there. Even Apple executives don’t expect it to do that well.

The main issue is that these are all US carriers which supply Apple's US fanboys. Apple's key markets for growth and success such as China are less likely to buy. The European market, which is more influenced by reviews than brand is also likely to be less interested. So far Apple has failed to mention pre-orders in those important areas.

It would be expected that early pre-orders of any Apple product would be high as these would represent the core of fanboys who buy anything that Jobs’ Mob offers. It would also include those who have deals to automatically replace their phones when a new model comes out.

Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said that the pool of existing iPhone users is about 50 percent higher than two years ago, which could raise iPhone sales to consumers in need of an upgrade, regardless of the 7's specs.

Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray pointed out that the opening sales figures "were never a great read on demand for the phone”.

"While investors tracked these numbers ... they were influenced by adding new launch countries and the amount of inventory Apple produced and sold into carriers and retail partners," Munster wrote

in a research note: "Pre-order numbers were a better indicator of demand, but Apple did not give them regularly. ... We don't view the change in policy as a sign that Apple has low expectations for the launch, but rather as a decision to get out of sharing a metric that could not grow forever."

Marni Walden, executive vice president and president of product innovation and new business at Verizon worried some analysts when he appeared to say it was just “business as usual.”

Some, like Ben Schachter, senior analyst at Macquarie Group, did his best to rally the Apple dreams saying people were happy with the iPhone 7.

"Not too long ago, people were afraid that the iPhone had had its best days, and it was going to be a decliner in perpetuity going forward. Now people seem to be pretty comfortable that you can be flat, to maybe a little bit of growth this year, and ... heading into the ten year anniversary next year, that should be a more meaningful upgrade cycle for them."

Apple itself said it will not release first-weekend sales of its new iPhone 7, saying that initial sales will be "governed by supply, not demand” which means that it will be keeping its supply tight to maintain the illusion of scarcity and popularity. We already know it has ordered a lot less of the phones from its Asian partners.

Samsung has revealed its 5.7 inch curved AMOLED phone that comes with its new iris scanner and as was the case with Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge it will ship with both Snapdragon 820 and Exynos depending on the market.

The US will see this phone on August 19 and T-Mobile in the US claims that the retail/etail price for unsubsidized phone is at $849.99 for 64GB. T-Mobile is willing to throw in a full year of Netflix, a Samsung Gear Fit2, or a 256GB memory card and it asks for $69.99 upfront and $82.50 monthly for 24 months.

Customers in the US will get the Snapdragon 820 version of the phone powered by Adreno 530, Cat 12 /13 Snapdragon X12 modem capable of 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload.

Snapdragon 820 will launch for China, Japan and North America, while Europe and rest of the world are stuck with Exynos 8890 the inferior of the two. We spent some time with Galaxy S7 with Snapdragon 820 and European version of Galaxy S7 with Exynos and we noticed that the Exynos version got really hot at times, and that the LTE performance was better on the Snapdragon 820 powered device. Qualcomm got quite a big chunk of business this time around, covering the biggest market by volume.

Note 7 has improved over the last generation as it has the new more sensitive S-Pen, a better low light camera with 12-megapixel rear camera, OIS, f/1.7 and 5-megapixel front camera and f/1.7. the battery grew from 3000 to 3500 mAh and the phone still measures a reasonable 153.5 x 73.9 x 7.9mm, 169g.